Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Artemis SBS on Android (Unofficial)

Don't know if you've heard of Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator, but it's pretty much the best game ever. If you like spaceships or cooperative games at all, you will be as hooked as I am!

A while ago, I decided that it would be pretty excellent to play this game on a tablet, and having a Nexus 7 and being an Android developer, I set out to do something about it. There's now an official iOS version available, but at the time I started, that hadn't even been announced.

And, I'm an Android guy.

So, I sat down with Wireshark and observed the packets that the official PC client sent and figured out the structure, then began the laborious process of building a packet parser in Java and continued figuring out the packets.

A couple months later, I now have an almost fully-functioning Android client, and wanted to share it here. To be clear, this is a completely unofficial and unsupported version, whose functionality is entirely based on me guessing at the packet structures. They seem to be mostly close enough, but I haven't had any input from the creator of Artemis about the correct structure, so weird things may happen!